When Michael Buchanan heard about the fire at the “Ghost Ship” warehouse in Oakland, he grabbed towels and jugs of water and rushed the four blocks from his home to the site. He arrived to find an inferno. “I saw a friend covered in soot,” Buchanan recalls. “He ended up being the last one out.”

Buchanan was familiar with the labyrinthine two-story structure, an unpermitted residence that hosted concerts in the east of the city. The dance music collective he co-founded, Katabatik, which organized festivals and parties, wouldn’t book there because it seemed unsafe. But his friends and collaborators were inside, and as the full extent of the tragedy became apparent – 36 people died – Buchanan says: “I knew that the amount of death meant that nothing would ever be the same.”

“In the wake of the Ghost Ship tragedy, unpermitted living, assembly and workspaces are under heightened scrutiny,” said the city’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, at the time. Property owners began mass evictions in the name of safety, with tenants in the live-work sector hit the hardest. For local musicians and artists, many of whom knew people directly affected by the fire or were there themselves, the looming threat of eviction became an immediate problem. A dozen properties were evicted after being deemed unsafe in the months following the fire.

Six months after the fire, its lasting effects on Oakland’s underground music scenes are becoming clearer. Some artists and promoters are beginning to operate in the regulated world, while others wonder how, or if, they can recede further into the darkness as more focus is put on stopping extralegal events. Within these insular communities, everyone is rethinking privacy and security.

Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, who said after the fire: ‘In the wake of the Ghost Ship tragedy, unpermitted living, assembly and workspaces are under heightened scrutiny.’ Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

Buchanan says he and the Katabatik collective were already pivoting away from shows. Commercial spaces amenable to discreet events, once abundant in Oakland, are fewer amid the real estate boom. The city’s average rent increased to $2,424 in 2017, up 0.9% from last year, while occupancy in the city is the highest in the Bay Area at 96%. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, tenants’ rights advocates drew a direct correlation between the city’s housing shortage and the fire. María Poblet, executive director of Causa Justa, a housing rights group, said: “If you can’t afford to buy a million-dollar home, then you can’t afford to live in this city unless you’re willing to risk your safety. And that’s unconscionable.”

The fire also claimed the lives of three people who were central to Katabatik: the resident sound man Barrett Clark, the projections artist Jonathan Bernbaum and the frequent performer Joey Casio. So Buchanan focused Katabatik on releasing music as a record label, slating eight titles for 2017.

“It used to be directly against our interests to promote anything,” says Buchanan, who has operated Katabatik in the Bay Area since 2002. “We’ve all been sitting on recordings, circulating them among each other, and now there’s this urgency to release them for posterity.”

Michael Daddona, an experimental music promoter, was at another show that night in December, one at a warehouse venue that has since been evicted. Among his many friends who died was his housemate and collaborator Jason McCarty. “A lot of the artists we lost in the fire didn’t leave that much work behind,” he says. “That taught me a lesson about impermanence and documentation.”

Indeed, many of the artists who died were regionally revered, but their music is only now seeing wider release: Joey Casio’s debut full-length as Obsidian Blade, his frenetically clattering techno outlet, is due out this year on the San Francisco label Left Hand Path, alongside a title by Johnny Igaz, another fire victim, as Nackt. Buchanan is sifting recordings by Clark for posthumous release through Katabatik.

Daddona and Buchanan’s newfound outspokenness is also meant to counter what they consider misleading media depictions of Ghost Ship victims as thoughtless hedonists. Daddona at first shunned the press (“We were asked to quantify our friends in a breath, which is impossible”) but eventually decided to “honor them by contextualizing their music, and releasing it in the service of their politics”.

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Another hallmark of the post-fire Oakland underground is heightened surveillance: city officials have sent warning letters, often with flyers evincing nightlife activity, to suspected unpermitted venues. Rightwing groups organized online on sites such as 4Chan to out and report the elicit venues they consider leftist hotbeds. A consensus emerged that social media, where underground events information centralized in recent years, was now compromised.

Secret, a storefront gallery and venue in Oakland, is responding to city officials’ scrutiny by legitimizing events. That means construction, costly permits and bureaucratic maneuvering, but Zoe Ceja, 31, a curator, casts the work as a tribute to friends lost in the Ghost Ship fire. “People like Micah and Denalda encouraged me to make a safe space,” she says. “So I want this place not just to continue but to outlast me, for them.”

Secret also has resources that didn’t exist before. The fire inspired many to improve and advocate for residences and cultural spaces vulnerable to displacement. “We’ve been able to raise $23,000 and confidentially see over 50 places,” says David Keenan of Safer DIY Spaces. “That’s because we have professionals donating labor, and life-safety things like exit signs are cheap.”

Others are hesitant to seek the same permissions; the experimental music venue 21 Grand, which shuttered in 2011 after Oakland officials demanded expensive structural improvements, is often cited as a cautionary tale. Groups such as Katabatik consider bars and nightclubs somewhat spiritually inhibiting, or contrary to the intentional yet freewheeling atmosphere of their events. “But to properly and safely keep doing what we’ve been doing under the radar – that’s going to involve recalibration, thinking outside the box,” Buchanan says.

“Katabatik started before social media was a big deal, more in this late-rave era of hotlines and map-points, so I’ve seen this gradual acquiescence to the convenience of Facebook event pages,” Buchanan says. “People are now seeing the laziness and insecurity of that, and I do think the only real sort of direction to go as far as underground is encryption, or offline.”

Julez Litman-Cleper, a local artist who performs as Waxy Tomb, is working with friends to supplant the usual social media platforms with semi-private online events directories. The first hurdle, though, is refining accessibility – how to block out, for instance, police, but attract users beyond a narrow peer group: “The question is how to create a network that expands your audience, but where the people are verified.”

The answers, says Litman-Cleper, involve integrating physical and digital life. Geolocation-based vetting means that physical access to one underground venue, for example, could help unlock information about others. And computer-vision means camouflaged markers, if recognized and scanned with a phone, could similarly verify users. The ideas update subcultures’ emphasis on locality and symbolism for the smartphone age.

“I felt really disempowered after the fire, unsure how to affect the physical forces reshaping the city,” Litman-Cleper says. “But I feel compelled to do something in the digital sphere, because I’m privileged to have skills there, and look at how we can more securely connect with one another.”